THE DEVELOPMENT OF WORKERS’ CHOIRS IN GERMANY

Written:Written after January 3 (16), 1913Published:First published in 1954 in the journalKommunistNo. 6.

      Printed from the original.

      Signed:T..Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1971,

      Moscow,Volume 36,

      pages225-226.Translated:Andrew RothsteinTranscription\Markup:S. RyanPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.  

      (2002).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Theworkers’ choral societies of Germany recently
celebrated a kind of jubilee: the number of worker-singers
reached 100,000, with a total membership of 165,000 in these
societies. The number of women workers in them is 11,000.

Theworkers’ choirs have their own periodical,Arbeiter-Sänger Zeitung, which began to appear regularly only
in 1907.

Thebeginnings of the workers’ choral societies date
back to the 1860s. A choral section was founded in the
Leipzig Artisans’ Educational Society, and one of its
members was August Bebel.

FerdinandLassalle attached great importance to the
organising of workers’ choirs. At his insistence, members
of the General Association of German
Workers[2]founded,
at Frankfurt am Main in 1863, a workers’ society called
the Choral Union. This Union held its meetings in the
dark and smoky back room of a Frankfurt tavern. The
room was lit with tallow candles.

Therewere 12 members of the Union. Once, when
Lassalle, on one of his speaking tours, stayed overnight at
Frankfurt, these 12 worker-singers sang him a song by the
well-known poet Herwegh, whom Lassalle had long been
urging to write the words for a workers’ chorus.

In1892, after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist
Law,[3]there were 180 workers’ choral societies in Germany with
4,300 members. In 1901, the membership reached 39,717,
in 1907, 93,000, and by 1912, 165,000. Berlin is said to
have 5,352 members of workers’ choral societies; Hamburg,
1,628; Leipzig, 4,051; Dresden, 4,700, etc.

Werecently reported how the workers of France and
other Romance countries had marked the 25th anniversary
of the death of Eugene Pettier (1816–1887), the author of
the famousInternationale.[1]In Germany, the propaganda
of socialism by workers’ songs is much more recent, and
the “Junker” (landowners’, Black-Hundred) government
of Germany has been throwing up many more foul police
obstacles to such propaganda.

Butno amount of police harassment can prevent the
singing of the hearty proletarian song about mankind’s
coming emancipation from wage-slavery in all the great
cities of the world, in all the factory neighbourhoods,
and more and more frequently in the huts of village
labourers.

[1]Seepp. 223–24 of this volume.—Ed.

[2]GeneralAssociation of German Workers—a political organisation
of the German workers set up at a congress of workers’ societies
in Leipzig in 1863, with the active participation of Ferdinand
Lassalle. The fact that, it was set up was of positive
significance for the working-class movement, but Lassalle, who
was elected President, took it along an opportunist path. It
confined its aims to working for a general franchise and
nonviolent parliamentary activity. Engels said that “‘universal, equal
and direct suffrage’ was propounded by Lassalle as the only and
infallible means of winning political power by the working class” =

(Marx/Engels,Werke, Band 16, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1962, S. 
327). Its leadership demanded the establishment of workers’
producer associations subsidised by the state which would
allegedly transform the Prussian state into a “free state of the people ”;
they regarded the peasantry as a reactionary mass. The
Lassalleans approved of the counter-revolutionary way of unifying
Germany “from the top”, through dynastic wars waged by Prussia.
It broke up in 1875.

[3]TheAnti-Socialist Lawwas introduced in Germany in 1878. It
banned all organisations of the Social-Democratic Party and
mass working-class organisations, closed down all working-class
publications and prohibited all socialist writings. Social–
Democrats were deported. The Law was revoked in 1890 under the
pressure of the mass working-class movement.